“I have not lost my mind — it's backed up in the cloud somewhere (part of it right here)!”

Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy

Abortion on grounds of gender could be formally outlawed in the UK within months after dozens of MPs backed a Parliamentary move to fast-track it onto the statute book.

More than 70 members, spanning the main parties, have put their names to an amendment to the Government’s Serious Crime Bill clarifying Britain’s abortion laws to exclude termination on grounds of the unborn baby’s sex.

The possibility of sex selective abortion in the UK was exposed in a Daily Telegraph investigation in which two doctors were filmed agreeing to terminations because the unborn babies were girls.”

While I applaud any law that reduces the number of abortions, this issue reveals the incoherence and hypocrisy of the prevailing beliefs about abortion in our western societies. If the foetus (and it is very unusual that it is called an unborn baby, as in this article) is not a human being, why does its sex matter when it comes to its abortion?

“But sex-selective abortion is discrimination of women and girls!” you cry. No, it is not, if the foetus is just so much tissue: only a human being can be called a girl and a woman; it makes no sense to speak of discrimination against a piece of tissue.

And if you grant that the foetus is a human being, so you can prohibit, prosecute and punish discrimination against it, but still allow abortion for non-discriminatory reasons, then you are effectively saying that killing a human being is sometimes ok, but discrimination is not; you have just made discrimination a more heinous crime than murder.